Murthy v. Missouri: There is no stupid culture war that Sam Alito wouldn’t fight

At times, Barrett sounds exasperated by the tricks the lower courts tried to use in this case; in one footnote, for example, she calls the district court’s findings “regrettably … clearly erroneous,” which is about as close as one federal judge can get to reprimanding another federal judge for considering harebrained conspiracy theories in the pages of the Federal Reporter. But given the lack of a sufficiently “concrete connection” between the government’s actions and the alleged harms, Barrett concluded, the court can decide the case without further examining those harms.

Alito did not feel similarly constrained. The bulk of his dissent, which is several pages longer than the majority opinion, is less concerned with legal doctrine than with an exhaustive listing of the evils of the Biden administration for future generations of groyper law graduates. He characterizes the White House as “intimidating,” “chastising,” and “interrogating” social media companies and operating a “covert censorship system” in which it “exerts relentless pressure … to suppress Americans’ free speech.” He describes the case as “one of the most important free speech cases this Court has achieved in years,” and laments his colleagues’ decision to ignore the plight of “victims” who “simply wanted to speak out on an issue of the highest public importance.”

Like most conservatives, Alito can’t decide exactly where the social media companies fit into his hero-and-villain model. Like most conservatives, that doesn’t quell his anger. At times, Alito expresses sympathy for Facebook, which found itself at the mercy of a tyrannical federal government. At other times, he castigates the social media companies for their cowardice, describing Facebook as a “whining,” “pleading,” and “subservient entity determined to remain in the good graces of a powerful taskmaster.” He is particularly outraged by Facebook’s failure to behave like an “independent news source or journalistic enterprise committed to holding the government accountable for its actions,” raising the disturbing possibility that Alito has no idea what Facebook is or how it works.